On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:11:39AM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:
On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 11:34:40PM +0100, Kake L Pugh wrote:
I realise this might be a slightly sensitive subject - but if there is nobody willing to step up and actively admin OGL, it may be time to gracefully retire it from service. Its current state is kind of embarrassing.
On Wed 23 Sep 2009, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:
Could you be more specific? What active admin do you think it needs (I'm tending to the pending moderations when I get time, but otherwise don't do much). What is embarrassing about its current state?
The only new pages that have been added recently are adverts. The information that was added by actual users is all out of date by at least four years. The transport pages are particularly misleading, since there have been many changes in those years. Nobody is curating the information, and there's no consistency of style. The coverage is confusingly patchy. The naming scheme is stuck between the pre-great-renaming postcode-in-title thing and the half-completed great rename. There are too many pages with content consisting solely of e.g. "View all pages in Locale Newington Green".
Is it really just me that thinks this? Are my standards too high?
This may be a London thing - to my eyes, as a Londoner who keeps up with the various London blogs and online guides to London, OGL is a mess - but perhaps to someone used to less-crowded online "markets" it's not quite so bad?
I'm not trying to criticise your work in keeping OGL free of wikispam
- that's an achievement in itself - but I do think that for a large
and constantly-changing city such as London there is a lot more to the job than the task of keeping the guide viagra-free.
I'm sorry for not replying to this sooner. There are a lot of good points here and I felt I need to reflect for a while; I wasn't planning on it taking this long.
I think that there is a clash of different philosophies here, to some extent. On the one hand, while I see the benefit of a well-looked-after wiki, I try and stick to the idea that there is not much on a wiki that is actively harmful, and that as long as the context is clear, out of date information is better than nothing. Maybe that's just my coping strategy for the situation that the Oxford Guide's in where something that's used up so much of my energy over the years is looking a little shabby round the edges due to me running out of steam, even though others do still contribute.
It doesn't seem that we can really compete on a technical level with the current state of the art in web-based presentation of the geo-ful content we're interested nowadays - I come across sites that do better every week - but that doesn't mean that there isn't still a niche there waiting to be filled. (I also wonder whether we can completely start again with the OpenGuides codebase and come up with something which competes in the web2.0 space, but I don't think I will ever have the time or energy to drive that myself).
All of that doesn't really address the specific points you made about the London guide, but on the other hand I do wonder to what extent you consider the other linked-to (from http://openguides.org) guides to be in a similar state. A lot of them never even took off.
At the very least I do think we need to change the style of london.o.o to make it clear that the content is considered stale, and we probably also want to disable edits (having a completely read-only guide involves a little bit of work in the code, as it's not a concept that's currently supported).
Maybe we also want to put some hints in to tell search engines not to bother.
But should we take it down altogether? I don't feel able to; as custodians of community provided data we should try and keep it relevant and useful, but if we can't do that shouldn't we at least retain it so that the useful parts are still accessible?